Trying Harder and Doing Worse: How Grocery Shoppers Track In-Store Spending
通过实地和实验室研究，发现预算购物者主要用心理计算追踪店内支出，但试图精确计算总价的人反而不如估算者准确，且动机越强越不准确，导致超支和不满。
Although almost one in three U.S. households shops on a budget, it remains unclear whether and how shoppers track their in-store spending to stay within those budgets. A field study and two laboratory studies offer four key generalizations about budget shoppers in grocery stores: (1) They predominantly use mental computation strategies to track their in-store spending, (2) they adapt their mental computation strategy to the dominant range of price endings of items in their shopping baskets, (3) those who try to calculate the exact total price of their basket are less accurate than those who estimate the approximate price, and (4) motivated shoppers are less accurate than less motivated shoppers (because they tend to calculate rather than estimate the total basket price). A second field study demonstrates that shoppers who underestimate the total price of their basket are more likely to overspend, leading to negative store satisfaction.